In the Stubbles of Renown

 Gleaners of Fame: A September Sonnet
by Alfred Austin  

 Hearken not, friend, for the resounding din
 That did the Poet's verses once acclaim:
 We are but gleaners in the field of fame,
 Whence the main harvest hath been gathered in.
 The sheaves of glory you are fain to win,
 Long since were stored round many a household name,
 The reapers of the Past, who timely came,
 And brought to end what none can now begin.
 Yet, in the stubbles of renown, 'tis right
 To stoop and gather the remaining ears,
 And carry homeward in the waning light
 What hath been left us by our happier peers;
 So that, befall what may, we be not quite
 Famished of honor in the far-off years.

Somewhat ironic, perhaps. Austin was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, a number of years after publishing this sonnet, and spent the rest of his career being criticized for not deserving it and only having received it because of his friendship with Lord Salisbury. (The derogatory nickname that seems to be remembered even today is "The Banjo Byron".) He's quite a decent poet, but he followed Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; almost no one was going to look impressive after that string of greats. It probably didn't help that earlier in his career he had foolishly written literary criticism bashing some of the great poetic names of the day, and, despite his poetic competence, his own poetry was not good enough to back up his big talk.  

Dashed Off XXI

 Love of the artwork makes it to be good in its kind; joy in the artwork ornaments it in a way appropriate to itself; peace in the artwork sets it in appropriate context.

Three parts of ancient Greek meal:
(1) sitos: staples, usually barley or wheat bread
(2) opson: salt, olives, cheese, boiled roots, vegetables, onions, fish
(3) potos: beverage
--> Note Xenophon (Mem 1.3.5): "[Socrates] ate just enough food to make eating a pleasure, and he was so ready for his food that his desire for sitos was his opson." Also note the criticism of the opsophage (Mem 3.14.4) and the comment about foods that persuade one to eat and drink when not hungry or thirsty (Mem 1.3.6). (Cf. Mobus on this.)

No one compares statements only with statements.

From the fact that a statement cannot be incorporated into a system of statements, we can only conclude that it is at least not part of this system, if it is viable or consistent; we cannot conclude that it is incorrect. That would requires us to know why it cannot be incorporated.

skill as a kind of security in difficult deed

'Her is no chos bot owder do or de." Wallace IV.593

Shy love as well bold love imitates God.

Joy is an adorning power.

Love deems it an honor to do good.

In the peace of charity, we dwell in the good of the loved as in something beautiful.

Our practical actions suppose contexts that give them meaning.

Akan proverbs (noted by Kwame Gyekye)
"If the occasion (situation) has not arisen, the proverb has not come."
"When the occasion arises, it calls for a proverb."
"Each destiny is unlike any other."
"The pursuit of beneficence brings no evil on the one who pursues it."
"Everything has its 'because of'."
"What is fated to prosper or succeed cannot be otherwise."
"God is the justification of all things."
"The earth is wide but God is the elder (chief)."
"All men are children, no one is a child of earth."
"Man is not a palm tree that he should be complete (self-sufficient)."
"The right arm washes the left arm, and the left arm also washes the right arm."
"If one eats the honey alone, it plagues one's stomach."
"The order God has settled, living man cannot subvert."
"Wisdom is not in the hand of one person."
"No one knows His beginning and His end."
"Everything is from God and ends up in God."
"Speech is one thing, wisdom another."
"The wise man is spoken to in proverbs, not in words (speeches)."
"Wisdom is not like money, to be tied up and hidden away."
"If a problem lasts for a long time, wisdom comes to it."
"All things depend on God."
"When a man dies he is not dead."
"God created everyone well."
"Trying hard breaks the back of misfortune."
"If a man is unhappy, his condut is the cause."
"Goodness is the prime characteristic of God."
"Character comes from your deeds."
"When a man descends from heaven, he descends into a human society."
"The prosperity of man depends on (fellow) man.
"No one teaches a child God."

NB that in Akan predicates can be used as commands, questions, and assertions.

four kinds of proprium
(1) exists for the whole of a species but not for it alone (e.g., natural and potential possession of two feet)
(2) exists only for one species but not for every member (e.g., knowledge of medicine)
(3) exists for every member of only one species, but not always (e.g. gray hair in old age)
(4) eixsts always for every member of only one species (e.g., risibility)
-- The true proprium (4) is that which does not cause variation of degree in subject and is not essential to it. It differs from accidents in being convertible with their subjects and from differentia in not eing substantial. It is identified with respect to matter, with respect to form, or with respect to an action from the form.

Using the material cause in explanation almost always requires some principle of conservation or uniformity.

Accidents subsist in individuals, propria in species, differentiae in genera.

Diodorean possibility (p is or at some point will be) and necessity (p is and at every point will be) as Diamond and Box with respect to a forward lightcone

"The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related in what seems an external manner." Iris Murdoch

"The beauty of the world is the order of the world that is loved." Simone Weil

Saints who are given the grace of extraordinary mortifications are given them not to show us what to do but to show us that our own ascetic labors are not so difficult, much less impossible or unbearable, as we might imagine from only comparing them to more comfortable lives.

The primary task of the beginner in the spiritual life is to develop the habit of prayer, i.e., ease of and swiftness to prayer in routine and out, through all the aspects of life; and the primary means to this are routines of prayer, detachment and small ascetic self-disciplines, and memorative practices like spiritual reading or icons, which refresh us and remind us to prayer.

** EW Trueman Dicken's summary of the Four Waters in the Life:
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (vocal/discursive prayer = 1st water)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet = Recollection = 2nd water (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (A1) First higher state -- quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (A2) Second higher state -- will and understanding involved, but not memory
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties = 3rd water
--- --- (C) Union = 4th water
** Summary of the Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (includes fervor novitium) = Mansions I
--- --- (B) Beginners II (arid vocal or discursive prayer) = Mansions II
--- --- (C) Beginners III (vocal or discursive prayer with sensible devotion) = Mansions III
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection = Mansions IV.iii
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet (infused consolations) = Mansions IV
--- --- (C) Union = Mansions V
** Summary of The Way
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners (vocal or discursive prayer)
--- ---  (B) [Active] Recollection (affective prayer)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (1) First higher state = quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) ?
--- --- (B) Union -- All faculties cleaving to God.
** Summary of Relation V
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (general awareness of the presence of God)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties -- during daily tasks(?)
--- --- (C) Union
** Final Tabulation up to Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (as in Mansions)
--- --- (B) Beginners II (as in Mansions)
--- --- (C) Beginners III (as in Mansions)
--- --- (D) Active Recollection (as in The Way [only])
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection (Mansions IV.iii)
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet, including
--- --- --- --- (1) Quiet maintained during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) (?) An indefinable, highly confused state
--- --- (C) (?) Sleep of the Faculties
--- --- (D) Union

God is not a pedagogical tutiorist; He often teaches in daring or even dangerous ways.

We should often most docilely consider the saints with whom we have the least natural sympathies.

Lived experience is not foundational but holistic. We do not so much build on it as within it; it is not the Ur-text but the context of our articulated experience.

A problem with Schutz's coneption of 'finite provinces of meaning' is his assumption of the 'world of working' as 'paramount reality', when in reality it is more like an incomplete hallway or exchange-station that nobody regards as adequate even on its own terms. We also recognize that this interchange connects to greater as well as lesser realities -- e.g., that of scientific theory, or artistic beauty, or religious communion, which are taken to be in some sense more paramount.

Irrationality requires an extensive context of rationality.

Part of moral maturity is being able to recognize both other sins and natural penalties as punishment for sin.

"With shame, the human being manifests almost instinctively the need of affirmation and acceptance of this 'self,' according to its rightful value. He experiences it at the same time both within himself and externally, before the 'other'." John Paul II
"Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and it can also be said that the world received man as a gift."
"Man appears as created, that is, as the one who, in the midst of the 'world,' received the other man as a gift."
"Masculinity and femininity -- namely, sex -- is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way."
"Happiness is being rooted in love."
"In the mystery of creation, man and woman were 'given' in a special way to each other by the Creator."
"Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within him the interior dimension of the gift."

One may have all the elements of a proof of p, and even recognize this, and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not mere possession of something that proves, even when aware of this possession. One may have adequate evidence to know p and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not the meeting of a threshold of evidence.

** Dicken on John of the Cross's Ascent
The Understanding -- to be mortified in respect of knowledge received
--- (1) Naturally
--- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent I)
--- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xii-xiv)
--- (2) Supernaturally
--- --- --- (a) Corporally
--- --- --- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent II.xi)
--- --- --- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xvi-xxii)
--- --- --- (b) Spiritually
--- --- --- --- --- (i) Distinctly (Ascent II.xxiiii-end)
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By visions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By revelations
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By locutions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By spiritual feelings
--- --- --- --- --- (ii) Confusedly (contemplation)

"Some people are so patient about not making spiritual progress that God would certainly wish them to be less so!" St. John of the Cross

spiritus vertiginis (Night I, xiv.3)

Note Dicken's insistence, on the Stages of Prayer table comparing Teresa and John, that these are 'a highly integrated pattern' but that the stages are not necessarily identical because (1) the sanits are presupposing somewhat different methods and backgrounds (Teresa's for those whose devotion is mostly affective and of the heart, John's for those with a more formal and discursive background) and (2) Teresa's terms are primarily focused on prayer time, John's on the whole attitude of life; they identify the same stages but not the same thigns, and the terms are not perfectly coextensive.

You can prepare for confession as much as possible, and it will still be the case that when you finally say something in the confessional, you realize that what you said is not quite right.

Juridical entities always require some natural anchor, although as the sophistication of the legal system increases, the indirectness can increase.

Grounding is not a relation but a status.

"No style can be good in the mouth of a man who has nothing, or nonsense, to say." C. S. Lewis
"'Look in thy heart and write' is good counsel for poets; but when a poet looks in his heart he finds many things there besides the actual. That is why, and how, he is a poet."

The artist imitates nature by the very act of imitation.

funerals as ways of showing respect to human dignity

A system in which pregnancy is treated as a secondary matter or inconvenience is an inherently misogynistic system.

The damned are constantly represented in Scripture as bound to or in fire, in such terms as to indicate that this binding induces both a moral qulity (awareness of restriction) and a 'physical' quality (actual constraint of behavior).

purgatory as a sharing of the Cross of Christ

The New Testament is even more concerned to represent God as judge than the Old Testament; this is inevitable, given that the NT has a greater concentration of apocalyptic.

Realms are governed by authoritative documents and appointed channels of communication.

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." Einstein

"A philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself." William James

Against a Dark Blue Night-Sky

 In The Damned, which I am of course currently reading for the fortnightly book, the Crucifixion of Mathias Grünewald, from the sixteenth-century altarpiece sometimes known as the Karlsruher Altar and sometimes as the Tauberbischofsheimer Altar, plays a significant role. One of the most famous passages from the book is a detailed attempt to convey it in words; the character Durtal, who has been (like Huysmans) hobnobbing with the Naturalists has grown tired of what he sees as their tedious book-exercise approach and, seeking a richer kind of naturalism, discovers it perfectly expressed in Grünewald's painting. Part of the description (in a different and older translation than the one I am reading):

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. 

 This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated. 

 Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia. 

 Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously. 

 The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight. 

Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.

The description is an implicit criticism in itself of Naturalism, I think; part of what Huysmans is suggesting is that Naturalism as a literary movement could not accurately describe even a painting like this in this way, because it is blind to the kind of experience that is required to do so. This is a fundamental reason why Naturalism as a literary movement began to give way to Decadence, as it began to dawn on artists, and writers and illustrators in particular, that, despite Naturalism introducing powerful means of description, Naturalists were getting their vivid realism not by describing reality as it actually was but by chopping off experiences that did not fit their preconceptions of reality. When I did Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diabolique, I noted that a lot of his work was motivated (explicitly) by a sort of contempt for the literary scene's handling of both moral and natural evil, and Huysmans has a similar view, possibly less contemptuous but certainly just as tired of it. As Huysmans once put it to a friend in a letter, he was disgusted by the Naturalists trying to convince people that devilry was an old wives' tale or a chemical imbalance, and tired equally of occultists with their tired treadmill of examples, and wanted to write a story that taught the lesson that the Devil was real and ruled the world. This was not a theological position but an artistic protest against what was increasingly seen as the dishonesty of the art of the Naturalists when it came to dealing with actual human experience. Decadence arises from applying techniques of Naturalist realism not to the humdrum and everyday but to the interesting extremes, especially interesting extremes of good and evil, that require stretching those techniques in new directions. 

[Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald - 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.2. Google Art Project, Public Domain, Link]

Gregorius Magnus

 Today is the feast of Pope St. Gregory I the Great, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From his Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Book II, Tenth Homily):

For Holy Church has two lives, the one which she leads temporally, the other which she receives for eternity, the one in which she labors on earth, the other in which she is rewarded in Heaven, the one in which she earns rewards, the other truly in which she rejoices in the receipt thereof, and in each life she offers sacrifices. Here of course the sacrifice of compunction, there the sacrifice of praise....Yet flesh is offered in each sacrifice because here the oblation of flesh is the maceration of the body, there the oblation of flesh is the glory of resurrection in praise of God. For truly the flesh is offered there as for an whole-burnt offering; when wholly changed in eternal incorruption it contains nothing of contradiction or mortality because, at once wholly kindled with the fires of His love, it will continue in praise for ever....

[Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Tomkinson, tr., Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (Etna, CA: 2008) p. 442.]

Implicit Intention

 ...Some considerable time ago, men of the world were in the habit of using much indecent language in mutual conversation; while, nevertheless, they thought it thoroughly ungentlemanly so to speak in the presence of ladies. We will suppose two gentlemen of the period to be talking with each other, while some lady is in the room, ocupied, we will say, in writing a letter. They are wholly engrossed, so far as they are themselves aware, with the subject they are upon -- politics, or the Stock Exchange, or sporting. They are not explicitly thinking of the lady at all; and yet, if they are really gentlemen, her presence exercises on them a most real and practical influence. It is not that they fall into bad language and then apologize; on the contrary they are so restrained by her presence that they do not dream of such expressions. Yet, on the other hand, no one will say that the freedom of their thought and speech is explicitly perceived by them to be interfered with. Their careful abstinence, then, from foul language is due indeed to an actual intention present in their mind: the intention, namely, of not distressing the lady who is present. Yet this intention is entirely implicit; and they will not even become aware of its existence, except by means of careful introspection. And this, we would submit, if we may here anticipate our coming argument, is that kind of practical remembrance and impression concerning God's intimate presence, which it is of such singular importance that I preserve through the day....

[William George Ward, "The Extent of Free Will", in Essays on the Philosophy of Theism, Volume II, Wilfrid Ward, ed., Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. (London: 1884) p. 286.]

Links of Note

 * Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor in the Mind: The Cognition of Metaphor (PDF)

* Michael Arsenault, Aristotle on Misperceiving

* Pauline Kleingeld, Kant's Analytic Method and the Argument of Groundwork I (PDF)

* Susan Pickard, Sex is Not a Spectrum, on Beauvoir's account of sex, at "Beauvoirian Feminism"

* Sarale Ben-Asher, Poetic Imitation: The Argument of Republic 10 (PDF)

* Connor Tabarrok, Floodplains, FEMA, and Financial Analysis, at "Of All Trades"

* Paniel Reyes Cardenas, Term Functor Logic Tableaux

* John Plaice, Leibniz's Teleology is the Basis for the Principle of Least Action, at "Fiat Lux"

* Ian J. Campbell, Rational Powers and Knowledge of Counterparts in Aristotle (PDF)

* Adam Louis-Klein, The Holiest Hatred, on our contemporary rise of anti-semitism, at "Tablet"

* Emily Herring, Laughter is vital, on Bergson's account of laughter, at "Aeon"

* David Weinberger, We Are More Than We Think, reviews Edward Feser's Immortal Souls, at "Religion & Liberty"

* Vanessa de Harven, The Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Hellenistic Period (PDF)

* Nicolas Sarzeaud, A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century. As the title suggests, a discussion by Oresme in the previously unpublished Problemata considers in passing the question of the Shroud as an example of religious fraud, and is the earliest skeptical mention (although we have indirect evidence that it was not an uncommon view at the time, and the cautious Holy See a bit later strictly required that it be displayed not as the actual relic but as a 'figure and representation' of the shroud of Christ). The mention is mostly unremarkable, except for historical interest, but Sarzeaud does a good job of discussing how these matters were approached in the fourteenth century.

* Typepad is completely shutting down. As the first of the major blogging platforms to fall, it seems like the end of an era. Part of the reason is due to broader business issues, so Wordpress and Blogger, which do not have the same problems, are likely to stand a while yet. (Indeed, while it's always difficult to guess how Google will go, I suspect the rise of LLMs has accidentally expanded Blogger's life, in the sense that Google has an additional incentive to keep it around a while yet, as a still-slowly-expanding mass of human text which Google can use for training.) But at some point the end will come for us all.

* Edward Feser, Maimonides on negative theology

* Christopher Pincock, Reichenbach, Russell, and scientific realism (PDF)

* Lance H. Gray, A Philosophy of Scarecrows

ADDED LATER: Graham Greene, noted Oneida actor from Ontario, died today. His most significant role, I think, was in Dances with Wolves, but I've always most loved his role as the sly and hilarious Joseph in Maverick. He was always great on the screen; he mentioned more than once in interviews that he preferred to do Native American and First Nations roles that went beyond the ordinary stoic stereotype of the silver screen Indian, and he was exceptionally good at bringing charm and humor to almost any role.

Fortnightly Book, August 31

 Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was born in 1848 to a French schoolteacher and a Dutch artist. He spent most of his life as a civil servant doing a job he disliked, but he also began a long career as an author in 1874, writing under the Dutch-ified version of his name, Joris-Karl, or J.-K., Huysmans. Originally he was known as an up-and-coming author of the Naturalist school, associated with Zola, but in the 1880s, having become convinced that Naturalism was deteriorating into a tedious treadmill of the same and the ordinary, he began to drift in another, darker direction, and eventually became known as one of the major writers in the Decadent school. In this period, his works became gloomy and exaggerated versions of his own life experiences and attempts to deal with the dreadfulness of modern life. He had originally expected this entire trajectory of his writing career to do poorly in terms of publication, consoling himself with the fact that he was doing something genuinely new, but the works touched a chord and often sold well.

The next fortnightly book is Huysmans's darkest and most controversial Decadent novel, Là-bas; the translation is literally 'Down There' but it is often given in English as The Damned. It tells the story of a man named Durtal, bored and disgusted by life, who throws himself into writing a biography of Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais was once the Marshal of France, a distinction he earned by exceptional valor while serving with St. Jeanne D'Arc. There is very little historical information about their relationship, which seems to have been purely professional and even merely occasional, but writers ever since have not been able to resist treating it as more, because of one very significant fact: Gilles de Rais, afterward, would go down a dark road, starting with grave financial troubles and ending with a trial in which he was accused of trying to summon demons (to get rich) and convicted and hanged for heresy, sodomy, and the murder of children. Historians debate how much of this was strictly true and how much of it was exaggerated (some of the financial troubles and some of the killings are almost certainly true), and folklore and the inevitable story-fascination of a saint interacting with an eventual devil-worshipper have exaggerated them even more. Gilles de Rais became a symbol for nineteenth-century Satanists, and thus Durtal's study of him leads him to the Satanist community in Paris. One of the many things that made the novel notorious was its depiction of Black Mass, based loosely on Huysmans's own experience of such a ceremony.

Là-bas would not be the last of Durtal; after the 'black book' of Là-bas, he wrote the 'white book' of En Route, and then La cathèdrale (his best-selling work), and L'Oblat, through which Durtal (in a path that was mirroring his creator's) continues to find disappointment in trying out means to escape the drudgery and sordidness of modern life, but on the way converts to Catholicism and eventually becomes a Benedictine oblate. All of that, however, is in the future. Huysmans himself did not yet know that this was to be Durtal's fate; he had not lived it yet. Here we begin, with the 'black book', the book of despair, the book about the disgusting horror pleasure can become when you try to make it something it cannot be.